mebody was moving!_

Naturally, I knew it could not be Macartney, because he could not have
got there, even if he had not had other fish to fry at home. But one of
his gang might have been left at Skunk's Misery and could have the life
choked out of him. There was no way leading underground directly from
the lean-to, or I would have been caught the night I slept there and
believed real voices were a dream. I slid out of the door, around the
boulder that backed the place, and was afraid of my lantern. I went down
on my hands and knees to feel for a track and found one, down a gully
that ran in under a blind rock. I crawled down it, all but flat, as I
burrowed like a rabbit, with my back scraping against the living rock
between me and the sky, and my head turned to the place where I knew the
lean-to stood. I was under it with no warning whatever; in a natural,
man-high cellar I could stand up in, with half a dozen bolt holes
running off it: and I had no need to flash up my lantern to see them.
There was a light in the place already from a candle-end Macartney's men
must have left behind; and beside it, not looking at me, not even
hearing my step, because he was sobbing his heart out, lay the boy I had
carried home from the Caraquet road!

"Thompson's boy, who took his horse to Billy--who never came back!" I
said to myself. God knows I touched him gently, but he screamed like a
shot rabbit till he saw my face.

"You?" said I. "What's the matter with you? Brace up; it's only me!"

Brace up was just what he did not do. He sank back with every muscle of
him relaxed. "Bon Dieu, I thought you was him come back," he gasped in
his bastard French Indian, "that man that half killed me on the Caraquet
road! But it wasn't him I was crying about. It was the other man--that
promised me two dollars for something."

"To come back and take a letter--where you had taken his horse?"

The boy--I did not even know his name--nodded, with a torrent of sullen
patois. He had never come for his two dollars, and now the man was gone
and he would never get it. But it was not his fault. The first man--the
one who had sent him to the Halfway with the horse--had caught him
crawling back for the letter, had told him the man who was going to pay
him had gone away long ago, and had taken him out to chop firewood and
let a tree fall on him. How the lad had ever crawled out to the Caraquet
road I did not ask. I think the thing that stabbed me was that